@jeff white - I think it’s pretty much all due to the SSD. Even comparing against my desktop iMac with its 2.66Ghz processor (faster), 7200 RPM hard drive (slower), and 4GB of RAM (same), the new Air loads Photoshop at least three times as quick.

@Geek for Him - I realize it’s not an apples-for-apples comparison, but per my reply to Jeff above the new Air’s load time performance is so much better than a higher-specced iMac that it’s obvious to me it’s the SSD that makes the big difference.

I had the first-gen 13-inch MacBook Air, which was a 1.8 Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM, and my new 11-inch MBA (which only has a 1.4 Core 2 Duo) blow is out of the water. The SSD makes a huge difference.

Although, it should be mentioned that in this case it’s not simply SSD versus HDD… the first-gen MBA used a particularly slow 4,200 RPM parallel ATA drive. Parallel ATA can be less than half the speed of SATA in bursts, which means that it just CRAWLED.

On my MacBook Pro, I just recently installed an SSD drive and while it’s definitely faster than a HDD, the difference isn’t nearly as large because I was coming from SATA and a 7,200RPM drive.

Still, the MBA can definitely be a person’s primary machine now, which wasn’t the case before (unless you didn’t mind waiting 3 minutes for it to do anything).

@Garrett Murray - hadn’t realized that there was more to it than just RPMs, but your experience echos mine. When swapping started happening, it was time to quit apps and go get a coffee cause it would be at it for a while. (The grime on the palm rests is ironically due to the Invisible Shield I have on it to protect the aluminum from my corrosive body chemistry; if/when I peel it off the aluminum underneath will be immaculate.)

@Chris - as slow if not slower. I actually think the video caught the old Air on a good day, that load time was a bit faster than I thought it would have taken.

@Matt - I noticed that too, which is why I stressed in the video it was off a cold boot. Once I had it loaded on the old Air, the second load was much quicker.

As a Limux user I am rarely impressed with anything that has got to do with performance on a Mac. And as a matter of principle I never buy hardware where the drive is not 7200 rpm or better and have not for many years.

Even so, I think that SSD is wicked fast.

OTOH, the old Macbook AIR is just a piece of crap from a performance perspective (4200 rpm - seriosly?), so the competition is not exactly hard.

I was given a MacBook Air as a gift in january, and i used it a lot. I would never, ever say it can be the primary machine for an IT professional…
I work a lot with virtualization, and I could never start up more than 1 virtual machine per time(only 2 GB ram, poorly performing HDD, etc.).
So, welcome SSD, but having 4 GB ram is another great step ahead. Not to mention, now MBA has more than just 1 USB port - yup!!

BTW, what about reliability? Any idea of what the lifetime of the SSD is?

Don’t get too excited. The speed diminishes once the disk is full. The issue with SSD is that the process or reclaiming disk space is inefficient. So once you start re-using sectors, it slows down considerably. If you’re using a disk that will never be full and you don’t delete anything; great. Otherwise you’ll be happy for a while and then you may be unhappy later on, as once you’ve used all of the sectors at least once it gets very ugly.